How to use internal marketing effectively
When it comes to marketing, we tend to look outside. But internal marketing is just as important. If done effectively, internal marketing improves employee engagement, increases brand reach and helps your staff make an emotional connection to the products and services you sell. This gives your customers an authentic and positive experience of your brand and encourages brand loyalty to translate to them too.
What is internal marketing?
Internal marketing is the promotion of a company’s objectives, mission, products and services to its own employees. The aim is to earn employees’ enthusiasm and loyalty by creating a connection to the brand.
The key to internal marketing is the realisation that all employees are part of the marketing effort. Staff across the whole business (not just sales and marketing) are engaging with prospective customers whether directly or indirectly and they all have an important role in the communication puzzle.
Internal marketing tactics
Many companies make the mistake of thinking that the role of internal marketing sits with HR alone. Although they have a big part to play when it comes to first impressions from recruitment and onboarding of new employees, marketing and sales teams then need to leverage this using consistent and effective communication. Some examples of this are:
- Educating employees on the company goals and values
- Encouraging employee input
- Nurturing communication and collaboration
- Making employees feel valued so they know that their contributions matter
- Getting the team involved in product and services
Getting the ‘people’ behind the business involved in marketing is often an overlooked resource, but employees are an important asset and should be considered a trusted resource.
Brand messages reached 561% further when shared by employees vs the same messages shared via official brand social channels (MSLGroup)
Taking your internal marketing further
To take internal marketing to the next stage and make it work effectively, companies should empower their employees to talk about the brand online. Once your company has educated its staff on the company goals and values as well as provided social media guidelines and training, then there is no reason why you shouldn’t trust your staff to share your message. It really can work to your brand’s advantage benefiting online visibility, increasing the quality of leads, and generally bringing more traffic to the company website. Try building your marketing from the inside-out and leverage your internal brand ambassadors – the team.